Sex Work During The Tokugawa Era

Sex Work during the Tokugawa Era

Elizabeth D. Lublin, Wayne State University, Department of History
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.71
Published online: 15 September 2022
Summary
In the early 1600s, the Tokugawa shogunate licensed prostitution as one of many policies that it implemented to
establish order and to consolidate its control over a once war-torn Japan. The system that emerged confined legal
sex work by women and girls to designated quarters, enclosed by walls and with their gates tightly regulated. The
prostitutes within overwhelmingly came from impoverished commoner families who sold their daughters into
indentured servitude to secure cash advances critical to their own survival. These transactions escaped
condemnation due to the belief that girls so sold were fulfilling their filial duty. The absence of any stigma
associated with officially authorized sex work conversely drew scores of men to the licensed quarters, and rapid
expansion of the commercial sector of the economy, the increasing use of cash, and urbanization produced a
commoner class able to vie with samurai, their political and supposed social superiors, for the affections of licensed
prostitutes. By the 18th century, the licensed quarters had become destinations for the masses, integral
components of the urban economy, and both site of and subject matter for a flourishing early modern culture. The
very existence of the quarters helped to legitimize prostitution and, together with growing economic stratification,
stimulated demand for cheaper sex. Sex work proliferated legally in the licensed quarters with female prostitutes
and both semiofficially and illicitly in cities, market towns, ports, and post stations around Japan, with women and
men and girls and boys selling and being sold for sex. While the shogunate tried to regulate clandestine female sex
work where it could and periodically imposed harsh penalties where systematic oversight proved elusive, it largely
turned a blind eye to male sex work. The vast majority of clients of male prostitutes were men themselves, and
sexual relations between men not only had been a common practice within samurai society for centuries but also
did not threaten the sanctity of the family or challenge gender norms. While the shogunate largely overlooked sex
work with foreigners as well during the early Tokugawa period, beginning in the 1640s and coincident with
restrictions on foreign trade, it sanctioned sexual labor but only by licensed brothel prostitutes. The easing of those
restrictions through treaties in the 1850s and the influx of foreigners prompted the opening of legal brothels and
quarters just for non-Japanese. Much more so than prostitutes with only Japanese clients, those servicing the
foreign population were stigmatized by Japanese and foreigners, with the latter linking them to the threat of
syphilis.
Keywords: Tokugawa era (1600–1868), Japan, shogunate, prostitution, sex work, licensed quarters, brothel, “floating world,
” ukiyo-e, nanshoku (male–male sex)
Subjects: Gender, Japan, Sexuality
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date: 13 April 2023
1
The Origins of Licensed Prostitution
Tokugawa Ieyasu’s victory in 1600 in the Battle of Sekigahara paved the way for the creation of
Japan’s third shogunate or military regime and the unification of the country after more than a
century of warfare. The following decades saw first Ieyasu and then his immediate successors
enact a range of policies or settlements, as Andrew Gordon has referred to them, designed to
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legitimize Tokugawa rule, to assert Tokugawa authority, and to ensure peace and stability.
Daimyō or regional military leaders were obliged to pledge personal oaths of loyalty to the
Tokugawa shogun, to spend half of their time in the new capital of Edo, and to leave there as
hostages their first wives and heirs in exchange for confirmation of their local rule and,
depending on the nature of their relationship with the Tokugawa, a role in shogunal
administration. The shogunate also sought to establish a hereditary social hierarchy based on
perceived contributions to the collective order and extent of moral authority, with samurai at the
top, followed by peasants, artisans, and merchants, respectively. Samurai were required to
establish residence in castle towns, thereby leaving the land and farming, while peasants were
confined to the countryside and, along with artisans and merchants, prohibited from bearing
arms. Outside these status groups existed members of the imperial family, Buddhist monks and
nuns, itinerant entertainers, blind masseurs, the Ainu, criminals, and eta, a hereditary group that
engaged in work deemed defiling. As the Tokugawa period progressed, this social order as
initially constructed was challenged by economic development, and significant movement within
3
and between groups as well as around the country occurred. The shogunate both accommodated
change and attempted to prescribe activities, particularly those that it deemed injurious to public
morals. Establishing official control over paid sex work stands out as one cornerstone settlement
of Tokugawa rule.
Efforts to manage prostitution in Japan were by no means new in the early 17th century. During
its last decades, Japan’s first military regime, the Kamakura shogunate (1185–1333), had created
an administrative office specifically charged with overseeing prostitutes, while the subsequent
Ashikaga regime (1338–1583) had officially recognized prostitution as a profession open to
women and taxed this line of work. In 1589, Ieyasu’s predecessor in the unification of Japan,
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had authorized the establishment of a pleasure quarter in Kyoto, which
became the country’s first enclosed brothel district and may well have taken inspiration from
Chinese quarters. Officials in Osaka had followed suit in 1610 when they had sanctioned their own
4
district. Building on these earlier steps, the Tokugawa shogunate proceeded to construct a
nationwide system of licensed prostitution (kōshō), which took place in sanctioned, regulated,
5
and taxed brothel quarters.
The impetus for the establishment of the first licensed district in Edo came not from within the
shogunal administration but from a brothel owner by the name of Shōji Jin’emon (or Jinnai) in
the form of a petition in 1612. By then three sections of the new capital were home to clusters of
bordellos, and lone or paired brothels dotted the city as well. In his appeal, Jin’emon referenced
this dispersion and claimed that it was “detrimental to public morality and welfare.” Elaborating
on that statement, he said that the current lack of regulation allowed a visitor to spend hours and
even days on end at a brothel, resulting in “neglect of duty toward masters, defalcations, theft,
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etc.” and enabled disreputable and even criminal elements to find places where they could hide
from family and public officials. The demand for prostitutes also fueled the kidnapping and
adoption of young girls with the intent to force them into sex work. Jin’emon postulated that the
relocation of all Edo brothels to a single area would enable the shogunate to prevent such
troublesome activities. To lend credence to that claim and likely to make his proposition more
appealing, he pledged the cooperation of brothel owners in keeping an eye open and reporting
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nefarious characters to the authorities.
While self-interest certainly motivated Jin’emon’s petition, his reasoning reflected a sound
strategy of playing to shogunal concerns about the threat of public disorder. Indeed, Edo was then
in the midst of a population boom, and the capital’s growing number of single men and
masterless samurai, many with grudges against the Tokugawa, made for a potentially volatile
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situation. The shogunate responded in 1617 by approving of the creation of a licensed quarter,
designating a particular section of the city for its site and putting Jin’emon himself in charge of
its management. In addition, it articulated five rules, which were to frame officially licensed
prostitution until the mid-19th century. The first stipulation decreed that brothels could only
operate within the quarter and similarly prohibited their prostitutes from residing and working
elsewhere, a policy that William Lindsey has characterized as “circumscrib[ing] the behavior of
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pleasure and sexual play through spatial restrictions and walls.” The second restricted a
patron’s stay to a maximum of twenty-four hours. The third and fourth banned sex workers and
brothels, respectively, from engaging in ostentatious displays whether with clothing or building
and decorative materials. The fifth required brothel owners to record the identities of all visitors
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and to alert Edo officials of anyone suspicious.
The inclusion of this fifth condition highlights just how important a role the shogunate assigned
to licensed districts as a mechanism for maintaining peace and order, just as Jin’emon had
anticipated. In the official line of thinking, the newly created system of licensed prostitution also
served as a necessary outlet for the passions of men and as a safety net for the indigent.
Indenturing a daughter to years of service in a brothel with the cash advance that a contract
provided meant survival for many among the large population of struggling families, and that
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fact was not lost on shogunal officials. The deep-seated notion that daughters so “sold” were
properly fulfilling their filial duties and the absence of an entrenched moral ethic that condemned
prostitution similarly informed the shogunate’s decision to authorize the licensed district.
Government budgetary considerations came into play as well. The fourth clause alluded to this
factor in that, in addition to regulating ostentation, it obligated the licensed district to pay taxes
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to and to perform other services for its administrative ward.
With shogunal authorization, Edo’s licensed quarter opened for business in 1618 on the site of
what had once been swampland. The preponderance of removed reeds provided inspiration for
the district’s name, Yoshiwara or “rush moor,” although the character used for “reed” (yoshi)
was subsequently switched to a different character with the same pronunciation but meaning
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“fortunate” to lend a more propitious air to this demimonde. By the early 1640s, Yoshiwara
housed nearly 1,000 prostitutes, a figure that nearly tripled in the next half century and reached
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7,000 by the mid-1840s. While Yoshiwara remained the only licensed district in Edo for the
duration of the Tokugawa period, it functioned as but the most famous of what became by the end
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of the 17th century a network of thirty-five sanctioned quarters or yūkaku around the country,
with Osaka’s Shinmachi and Kyoto’s Shimabara rounding out the top three in terms of size and
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reputation.
Inside the Licensed Quarters and Changes to Them over Time
Walled enclosures and restricted access through a single gate and in some cases moats
demarcated the licensed quarters from the urban communities to which they catered. Guards
working in shifts ensured that none of the residents left without proper documentation and that
all visitors abided by the rule that they hand over their swords before passing through the
threshold. The walls contained within them a collection of ageya or “houses of assignation”
where the highest ranking prostitutes entertained clients (at least until the mid-1700s),
teahouses where visitors made arrangements for sexual trysts, brothels where all prostitutes
lived and lower-ranking ones met customers, and stores catering to the daily needs of residents
(see Figure 1). A class system separated the brothels. Initially the status of the resident prostitutes
determined the class of each bordello. By the late 1700s, however, ranking was reflected in the
height, width, and proportion of coverage provided by lattice bars fronting the ground floor and
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through which potential clients could gain a glimpse of the prostitutes on site and available.
Figure 1. The density of the brothels, teahouses, and other establishments within Yoshiwara, as depicted in this
1846 map, reflects both the physical restrictions of the district and the demand on the services that it provided.
Illustration from J. E. de Becker, The Nightless City or the History of the Yoshiwara Yūkwaku, 1846. From Wikimedia
Commons <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/1846_Yoshiwara_map.jpg>
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The status system differentiating licensed prostitutes (yūjo) evolved as the Tokugawa period
progressed and equated to a rigid, multilayered social hierarchy. At the pinnacle into the 18th
century were the tayū. In the first decades of the 17th century, this term was used to refer to
prostitutes who were adept at conversation, knowledgeable about poetry, accomplished at
calligraphy, and skilled at entertaining, including singing, dancing, and playing such musical
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instruments as the koto, shamisen, and shakuhachi. By the 18th century, however, attainment of
this status had come to require remarkable physical beauty as well, with such traits as a flat nose,
prominent front teeth, and unusually curly hair being cause for rejection. The demands of having
both artistic skill and beauty resulted in tayū making up a very small percentage of licensed
prostitutes. Indeed, according to a guide to brothel quarters from 1688, Shimabara and Shinmachi
housed only thirteen and seventeen tayū out of populations of 329 and 983, respectively, while a
1690 map book of Yoshiwara claimed that its nearly 3,000 sex workers included just three. Those
few commanded significant attention, typically had calendars booked months out, and were able
to charge far more than most clientele could afford for a few hours or a whole evening of
companionship. The rank of tayū also granted women a degree of independence in selecting
patrons and empowered them to make or break the reputations of male elites. As Teruoka
Yasutaka has asserted, “rejection by a tayū branded a man as lacking in sensitivity, artistic
interests, classical education or physical attributes. A sullied reputation could destroy his
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confidence for social intercourse in the upper class.”
During the first half century of Tokugawa rule, the typical tayū patron came from the ranks of
high-level shogunal officials, daimyō, and court nobles. By the late 1600s, however, townsmen
(chōnin) had emerged as frequent visitors to the licensed quarters. The requirement that samurai
live in castle towns, their payment for services rendered in the form of rice stipends, and the
stipulation that daimyō spend half of their time in residence in Edo and half back in the home
domain stimulated urbanization and sparked both the development of the commercial sector of
the economy and the use of cash for transactions. The merchants and artisans who lived in the
cities were the main beneficiaries of these changes. In the face of restrictions on building
ostentatious homes and clothing themselves in luxurious fabrics, they found an outlet for
enjoying their wealth within the “floating world” or the ukiyo. This world encompassed the
licensed entertainment quarters and represented, to quote Richard Lane, the “newly evolved
stylish world of pleasure, the world of easy women and handsome actors, all the varied pleasures
18
of the flesh.” The lure of the ukiyo was so strong that samurai of various ranks as well found
release from shogunal expectations, as well as family pressures, within the licensed quarters, at
times in violation of official bans on their visits.
The change in clientele contributed to a degentrification of the brothel districts, especially in the
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Yoshiwara, Shimabara, and Shinmachi, where newfound wealth provided access. A decline in
the number of tayū occurred as well, in part because patronage of their services came to epitomize
profligacy, and the shogunate increasingly cracked down on extravagant spending because that
ran counter to the Neo-Confucian ideal of frugality. The eventual disappearance of tayū in the
second half of the 18th century deprived the licensed quarters of an “aura of dignity and
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radiance.” Replacing them as the highest ranking prostitutes were sancha, a term for a poor
grade of powdered tea and originally assigned to lowly teahouse waitresses who engaged in
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prostitution indiscriminate of who the client was. While some sancha rivaled tayū in terms of their
beauty and refinement, their services were far less expensive thanks to lower fees and no added
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expenses stemming from the use of an ageya. Their greater affordability and thus popularity yet
furthered the transformation of the licensed quarters into a destination for porters, shop clerks,
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fishmongers, and scores of other townsmen and travelers.
In conjunction with this evolution, the brothel districts took on an increasingly tawdry air as
places where men went simply to buy sex without being entertained as well with music, dance,
and refined conversation (see Figure 2). This shift contributed to the exploitation of young girls
and women who had already been treated as chattel by impoverished parents who had sold them
as indentured servants in exchange for a cash advance, as mentioned earlier. Tokugawa law
stipulated that only those aged eighteen and over could legally engage in prostitution. This
restriction did nothing to stop the sale of girls as young as six or seven, and a sex worker’s loss of
virginity in her early teens was not uncommon. Brothel owners were able to charge a steep fee for
the privilege of deflowering a prostitute and took advantage of the “innocent” to acquire extra
23
profit.
Very little of that money found its way into the hands of the girls and women themselves, and
their myriad expenses for accommodations, food, clothing, cosmetics, haircare, and other
incidentals, not to mention lessons and assistants of those of higher rank, often left them in debt.
Stories of wealthy clients falling in love with prostitutes and buying out their contracts had great
appeal but did not become the reality for more than a miniscule percentage of those otherwise
confined to the licensed quarters. Long days, poor nourishment, the threat of pregnancy and
sexually transmitted disease, emotional and physical abuse, and pressure to have sex with as
many men as possible regardless of their appeal proved more characteristic of a licit prostitute’s
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existence. The supposed glitter of the licensed quarter belied the harsh and debilitating
circumstances in which legal prostitutes worked, and the flourishing of the Tokugawa economy
came at a steep price for those who found themselves paraded around and put on display as
sexual commodities.
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Figure 2. This woodblock illustrates the openness of the many nonexclusive brothels operating in Yoshiwara
during the late 17th century. Lobby of a Brothel, from the series Yoshiwara no tei, Hishikawa Moronobu, c. 1680.
From Wikimedia Commons <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hishikawa-Moronobu-woodblock-
print-1680.jpg>.
Sex Work Outside the Licensed Quarters and Outside of Tokugawa Law
Although the creation of the licensed quarters made prostitution outside their enclosures illegal,
sex work flourished beyond their walls and gates during the Tokugawa period. The brothel
districts themselves contributed to this growth in that they lent legitimacy to paid sex work at the
same time that the fees that they charged precluded visits by scores of men, even with the greater
affordability of some licensed prostitutes. Economic development and, more specifically, the
expansion of commercial activities, increasing use of cash, and a rise in disposable income also
fueled the expansion of the sex trade around the country. So did greater economic stratification,
as the bottom levels produced more and more families and individuals in dire circumstances and
desperate for the income that prostitution could provide. The prevailing view that wives existed
for procreation and prostitutes and concubines for sexual gratification served as yet another
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catalyst.
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The burgeoning business of prostitution outside the licensed quarters took two general forms,
with one being semiofficially authorized by the shogunate and the other operating without
government sanction. The former occurred most commonly in the inns and tea shops that
populated official post stations along the major transportation routes leading to and from Edo. In
the early 17th century, the shogunate assumed control over these routes and allocated land for the
construction of stations where travelers on official and private business could rest, change horses
and porters, and acquire needed provisions. The stations grew to number around 250 and became
quite busy thanks to shogunal restrictions on sea transport and a late 18th-century boom in travel
for recreation and pilgrimages as part of what Constantine Vaporis has characterized a “culture of
26
movement.”
Initially, the shogunate had forbidden the inns and tea shops at the stations from hiring
prostitutes but modified that prohibition in 1678, in 1718, and again in 1772 in the face of the
pervasiveness of violations. The earlier two accommodations let first tea shops and then inns hire
two prostitutes each, provided that these women were referred to euphemistically as
“waitresses.” The third subsequently revised the number of working women from two per
business to a set figure overall for the four post stations closest to Edo (see Figure 3) . Sone
Hiromi has pointed out, however, that rarely did station officials forcefully impose the number
limits. The economic gains to be had were simply too great. A waitress was able to charge a
customer between 150 percent and 350 percent of what he paid for just his lodging, and the
station office took a portion, requiring that each woman pay a fixed sum per client daily as well as
a set amount from earnings each month. That cut constituted shogunal revenue, provided needed
funds to maintain the stations, and contributed to the shogunate’s willingness both to authorize
27
the hiring of waitresses and to take a laissez-faire approach to their regulation.
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Figure 3. This print’s focus on working women reflects how vital their service as sex workers was to the economic
flourishing of post stations in the late Tokugawa period. No. 10, Fukaya Station, from the series The Sixty-nine
Stations of the Kisokaidō Road, by Keisai Eisen, 1830s, Publisher: Takenouchi Magohachi, c. 1835–1838. From
Collections Artsmia.Org <https://collections.artsmia.org/art/22734>.
“Private” prostitution, however, fell outside of any government sanction and involved women
who made a living both through a combination of prostitution and other wage labor and through
sex work alone. The former included bathhouse attendants, hairdressers, waitresses, tea servers,
maids, dancers, singers, and musicians, to mention a handful of occupations open to women in
early modern Japan. The establishments for their “day” jobs regularly served as settings for them
to meet customers who were open to a proposition or initiated a sexual transaction themselves,
and the exchange of sex for money occurred both by prior arrangement and on an impromptu
basis. In Edo, “the hills” (okabasho) became a moniker for the several dozen areas dotting the city
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that were rife with establishments where female employees engaged in prostitution on the side.
Suppression of sex work by part-time prostitutes vexed the shogunate, in part due to their often
spontaneous nature, in part due to the sheer number of sexual transactions, and in part due to the
fact that places like the hills hired lookouts to provide advance notice of approaching policemen
charged with cracking down on illegal prostitution. In an attempt to save face and to establish at
least some semblance of authority over part-time prostitution, the shogunate redefined what it
considered to be illegal sex work and revised penalties accordingly. Given a pass were waitresses
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and entertainers who negotiated to have sex with customers above and beyond the services that
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they provided in their capacities as “legitimate” workers. In making this exception, the
shogunate effectively placed part-time prostitutes in urban areas in a similar category as those in
the post stations, although it did not reap nearly the financial rewards for doing so. According to
Shiho Imai, this same exception also served to link prostitution and wage labor in the minds of
30
the public and contributed to the stigmatization of female labor overall as “deviant.”
Even further removed from notions of proper womanly conduct were clandestine prostitutes
(kakushi baita) who did nothing but sex work out of either desperation stemming from divorce,
disease, abandonment, abject poverty, or due to compulsion. Although some women did operate
entirely on their own, the majority were bound by contracts to agents. Their handlers included
31
some women, with female kimono brokers in particular reputed to earn a side income as such.
The far more prevalent male pimps (zegen) came overwhelmingly from the dregs of urban society
and included gangsters and vagabonds, as well as those temporarily or permanently down on
their luck. The fate of prostitutes at the hands of pimps was precarious at best. Confinement,
beatings, pressure to serve as many clients as possible, inadequate nutrition, and at best minimal
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medical care ensured that many a prostitute died prematurely. In this respect, whether a
woman worked as a yūjo, as a post station waitress, as a dancer cum prostitute, or as a
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streetwalker mattered little. Female sex workers were treated as disposable commodities, and
those who gave any semblance of choosing a life of prostitution themselves and of profiting from
it increasingly found themselves not the objects of veneration for showing filial piety but the
targets of criticism for being responsible for “the decaying countryside, the failing state, and the
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crumbling family.”
The shogunate viewed prostitution involving clandestine sex work under contract as a true
scourge and initially adopted penalties extending to the draconian in response. These targeted
not customers but rather prostitutes and pimps, with the former being sent to Yoshiwara and the
harshest for the latter being execution. The early 18th century saw a shift in Tokugawa policy, and
its nature suggests that the motivation was largely economic. According to a list of punishments
then in effect, handlers and those who owned locations where prostitutes had sex were subject to
fines and imprisonment, while guarantors and a handler’s landlord, household-group head, and
ward administrator faced either confiscation of property or a cash levy. The period of indenture in
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Yoshiwara for prostitutes engaging in unsanctioned sex work was also standardized at 3 years.
Thereafter, the shogunate launched large periodic campaigns to enforce the ban on “private”
prostitution and to impose the above penalties both independent of and as part of wide-reaching
reform programs, such as in 1789. The previous two decades had seen the Tokugawa
administration attempt to strengthen its finances by expanding foreign trade, creating
monopolies on key commodities, requiring licenses for merchant guilds, debasing coins, and
reclaiming land. The extent to which corruption and official abuse of resources prevailed,
however, undermined its authority, and its standing became even more precarious when a string
of natural disasters, including one of Japan’s biggest volcanic eruptions in history, turned
widespread poverty into a massive famine in the mid-1780s and gave rise to protests and riots in
areas both rural and urban. Conservatives within the shogunate interpreted these problems as a
consequence of moral degeneracy and, when the Confucian conservative Matsudaira Sadanobu
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took over as chief shogunal advisor in 1787, he moved quickly not only to rein in inflation, to
promote frugality, and to provide relief aid to peasants and indebted samurai, but also to elevate
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public morality.
Matsudaira attacked a host of public behaviors that he found objectionable. He took aim at
gambling, mixed bathing, garish clothing and hairstyles, and censored artists and writers who
37
glamorized the licensed quarters. Clandestine sex work drew his ire as well, and during his 16
38
years as councilor, he issued numerous special ordinances to rid streets of prostitutes. One such
ordinance in 1789 led to the arrests of thousands engaging in unsanctioned sex work in Edo,
Osaka, and Kyoto, prostitutes who were then relocated to Yoshiwara or nearby villages. As Cecilia
Seigle has noted, Matsudaira “hoped both to cleanse Edo of vice and, by sending the arrested
prostitutes to the countryside, to alleviate the shortage of marriageable women in rural villages”
39
and thus to reconstitute tax-paying peasant families.
How many of these women became productive farming wives remains unknown, but overall
Matsudaira’s campaign against illegal prostitution failed. His moral stringency found little
popular support, and the supply of and demand for illicit prostitutes persisted. Moreover, many of
the inspectors charged with cleaning up the streets took bribes to look the other way. By no
means was this corruption a new occurrence, and the fact that the Edo police dispatched spies to
40
root out crooked inspectors highlights how problematic enforcement of ordinances was. As the
1789 crackdown and earlier revisions of rules regarding prostitution outside of the walls of the
licensed quarters reveal, concerns about political, economic, and social control played a role in
determining when, where, and how the shogunate acted. Often those actions saw the
administration reacting to the realities of prostitution outside the licensed quarters and trying to
make the best of a situation that challenged the extent of its public authority.
Male Sex Workers
While the majority of prostitutes during the Tokugawa period were female, male sex work was a
thriving business as well (see Figure 4). Women made up a portion of the client base, although
men predominated. This same-sex aspect of much male prostitution owed its origins primarily to
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the practice of male–male sex (nanshoku) within samurai society. For centuries, sexual
interactions and relationships between warriors had been commonplace, particularly between
partners of unequal status and divergent ages, a custom referred to as the “way of
youth” (shudō). Such had persisted in the absence of public opprobrium and significant religious
vilification, and with acceptance as one way to initiate young men into the ways of the warrior.
That lack of stigmatization contributed during the Tokugawa period to the spread of nanshoku
among commoners who followed in the footsteps of samurai in seeking sexual pleasure through
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male–male sex, and particularly the practice of shudō.
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Figure 4. The partially shaved head and kimono style and color of the figure on the left made him readily
identifiable as a youth, in contrast to the adult garb of his sexual partner. Man and Youth, from a series of painted
hand scrolls by Miyagawa Isshō, c. 1750. From Wikimedia Commons <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Samurai_kiss.jpg>.
Male prostitution differed from female prostitution in a variety of ways beyond the prevalence of
same-sex relations. First, the shogunate did not deem male sex work as necessitating systematic
regulation, and as a result, did not confine male brothels to licensed quarters. Nor did the
Tokugawa institute a set of harsh punishments for the act of paid male–male sex or specifically
43
criminalize it. This is not to imply that officials saw male prostitution as harmless and patrons
of men as any less susceptible to debauchery and neglect of duty than those who paid for sex with
women and girls. The latter was one reason why male prostitutes and the establishments where
they plied their trade did not escape unscathed periodic moral campaigns against lewd behavior
and crackdowns on clandestine prostitution. A case in point was the Tempō reforms of 1841–
1843, which combined measures to revive the agricultural vis-à-vis the commercial sector of the
economy, to eliminate corruption from among official ranks, and to rectify public morality.
Clandestine female prostitution represented a major target, and over 4,000 women and girls were
arrested and hundreds of illegal brothels shuttered. Teahouses with male prostitutes
(kagemajaya) were caught in the same net, and all those operating in Edo were forced to close.
That they were ordered shuttered more because of concern about female than male clients speaks
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to where official concern with prostitution really lay. Again, male prostitution flourished
largely out of official crosshairs and for a variety of reasons. Male prostitutes did not pose a threat
to officially endorsed Neo-Confucian precepts about the family and approved gender roles. As
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same-sex marriage did not exist, a male prostitute was not a potential marriage partner for most
of his clients, and the question of offspring was mute. Moreover, male same-sex relations did not
preclude marriage, and men made use of male prostitutes before and after taking a wife, thanks
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in part to the absence of any stigma attached to male–male sex.
These differences aside, male prostitutes shared a number of key practices and behaviors with
their female counterparts. Both communities saw the development of a rigid hierarchy, with
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appearance and entertaining skill differentiating ranks and rank determining fees. Clients also
varied widely in terms of their economic status as visits to the lowest of prostitutes were within
the means of even construction workers, servants, and shop clerks. In addition, the community of
male prostitutes included both those whose income derived solely from sex work and those who
plied the trade on the side. Brothels devoted to male–male sex existed as well, although, like with
the female licensed quarters, they did not have a monopoly on prostitution. Teahouses,
mentioned in the section “Inside the Licensed Quarters and Changes to Them over Time,”
proliferated within urban theater districts, in castle towns, in post stations, and near shrines, and
visitors could buy the services of on-staff male prostitutes or arrange for assignations with those
on call. So-called “children’s shops” (kodomoya) catered to the many clients with a propensity
for shudō by providing boys and young men, as did the homes of kabuki actors with their coteries
of trainees, many of whom were being groomed to portray women on stage. Itinerant actors not
connected with official kabuki troupes, bathhouse attendants, tailors, and peddlers were engaged
47
in sex work as well, to list just a few of the other jobs that male prostitutes had.
Foremost among the similarities between female and male prostitution during the Tokugawa
period was commodification. While samurai couplings had initially, and more often than not,
involved the senior partner offering guidance and patronage in exchange for sex, as mentioned
earlier in this section, male prostitution during the Tokugawa period did not perpetuate that
bond. Instead, the relationship between a male prostitute and a client represented a commercial
transaction, with cash being paid for pleasure. The emergence of commoners as key consumers of
male–male sex contributed to that commodification. Unlike with female prostitution, however,
male sex work, at least in Edo, declined during the last century of the Tokugawa period, evidenced
by a steep drop in the number of both sites where assignations took place and male prostitutes.
The bakufu’s forced closing of teahouses during the forementioned Tempō reforms and
subsequent restrictions placed on the activities of itinerant actors stand out as but two causal
48
factors.
Sex Work and Foreigners
Japanese also engaged in sex work with foreigners during the Tokugawa period, continuing a
business that dated back at least to the 14th century when brothels in port towns serviced
travelers from the Asian mainland. The arrival of first Portuguese and then other European
traders expanded the client base, and reports sent back home included comments about brothel
keepers propositioning newcomers just off ships with women and girls available for purchase.
Foreign customers received these prostitutes in their own places of residence and also frequented
brothels, with the sex trade doing a particularly thriving business after the arrival of Dutch and
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English merchants in the early 1600s. While some females were sold for hours or days, others
were bought as concubines with the expectation that they would provide sexual services for years,
and it was not unheard of for foreign traders and even ship crewmen to force concubines to depart
Japan with them when they left. This overseas trafficking in Japanese women extended to the
kidnapping and spiriting abroad of brothel prostitutes, was common enough to elicit
condemnation from Catholic missionaries, and led Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the second of Japan’s
49
unifiers in the late 16th century, to issue edicts outlawing the practice.
Between the mid-1620s and the early 1640s, the shogunate issued a series of edicts ending trade
with Spain, expelling all Portuguese, and confining the Dutch to the man-made island of Dejima
in Nagasaki harbor. Although these measures greatly reduced the size and mobility of the
European population in Japan, the demand for sexual services did not disappear. As foreign
women were prohibited from entering the country and thus meeting that demand, local shogunal
officials arranged for prostitutes to visit the Dutch on Dejima, just as they arranged for food,
water, and other basic commodities to be delivered. Those same officials set prices for visits and
determined the length of time individual prostitutes remained on Dejima, although at times they
were lax in enforcing their own rules as well as periodic injunctions from Edo issued against any
contact between the Dutch and Japanese sex workers. From the late 1600s, periodic and highly
regulated visits by the Dutch to Nagasaki’s Maruyama brothel district, established in 1642, were
also permitted, and sources reveal that thereafter Dutch traders stopped at brothels while
50
traveling back and forth to Edo for annual tribute missions.
Far exceeding Dutch demand for sex work in Nagasaki was that from the city’s Chinese
community, which totaled several thousand compared to one to two dozen Dutchmen on average
51
each year on Dejima. Until restricted to a designated quarter in the city in 1688, Chinese
residents had been free to frequent Maruyama and to pay for sex with women working in bath
houses. Thereafter, prostitutes in Maruyama brothels were sent out to service Chinese in their
own neighborhood, with rules like those for the Dutch about length of stays. They were also
dispatched in boats to welcome visiting Chinese ships and to try to entice those aboard to
disembark for sex. These sex workers were known by the term Kara-yuki (“going to the Chinese”)
in comparison to prostitutes sent to Dejima, who were called Oranda-yuki (“going to the Dutch”),
labels that periodically accompanied the acquisition of language and musical skills designed to
52
cater to one of the two groups. As Laura Nenzi has noted, the very foreignness of the Chinese
and the Dutch and curiosity about their sexual relations with Maruyama prostitutes made this
brothel district a destination for many Japanese travelers eager to experience the exotic together
with the erotic. Descriptions of Maruyama in guidebooks and in literature and depictions on maps
53
and in woodblock prints both fed this interest and facilitated such visits.
In the 1850s, the conclusion of a series of unequal treaties negotiated through the use of gunboat
diplomacy undermined the shogunate’s ability to control sexual contact between foreigners and
Japanese. First, in 1854, the Kanagawa Treaty opened Shimoda and Hakodate to American ships
and allowed for largely unrestricted movement by American sailors in those ports, in addition to
permitting an American consul to reside in Shimoda. Concluded with the United States, the
Netherlands, Russia, England, and France 4 years later, the Ansei Treaties in turn opened
Kanagawa and four additional ports to residence by citizens of these countries. Initially local
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officials had little option but to allow those who came to shore to visit prostitutes. They also on
demand procured women for sex work, often under the guise that the work would instead be as
maids and nurses. Disorderly conduct by foreign sailors, conflicts that had the potential to
escalate into major diplomatic problems, and foreign pressure soon led officials to establish
54
designated and regulated sites for sex work specifically for the growing foreign community.
These sites ranged from single “rest houses” (kyūsokujo), such as in Shimoda, to a licensed
quarter with just over a dozen brothels in Yokohama. Modeled on the Yoshiwara and named
Miyozaki, the district in Yokohama was built on reclaimed swampland, was physically separated
from the port by a causeway and moat, and had a policed gate to regulate comings and goings.
The most famous establishment in the district was the Gankirō brothel, a massive two-story
structure with an inner courtyard sporting a man-made lake, a large sitting room, numerous
55
bedrooms, and a separate wing to accommodate Chinese customers (see Figure 5). An official
report from 1862 surmised that some 500 females worked as prostitutes in Miyozaki, a number
that represented maybe one-quarter of the number of women and girls selling sex as unlicensed
prostitutes in Yokohama. Those officially licensed included mistresses of foreigners who were
56
supposed to register as prostitutes even if they were not contracted out by brothels.
Figure 5. This triptych highlights the many attractions of the Gankirō to its foreign clientele shortly after its
opening. The Interior of the Gankiro Tea House in Yokohama, by Suzuki Hiroshige II, 1861, The Metropolitan Museum
of Fine Art <https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/55913>.
As with prostitutes serving Japanese, those engaged in sex work with foreigners during the
Tokugawa period typically were sold into the trade by impoverished parents, yet the latter faced
stigmas and indignities the former did not. While the Japanese showed curiosity about sexual
relations between foreigners and their female compatriots, as mentioned earlier, that interest
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was mixed with ambivalence from some and outright disdain from others. Indicative of the latter
was use of the word rashamen for prostitutes serving foreigners. The term means “sheep’s wool”
and refers to a purported practice of sailors to keep a sheep onboard to copulate with. Informing
this term was the idea that neither the sheep nor the prostitutes had a say when it came to sex,
57
although that lack of choice did not elicit empathy. Foreigners also turned a wary eye toward
Japanese prostitutes while simultaneously demanding sexual services. By the mid-19th century,
in the West syphilis had come to be seen as a threat to society and the family and prostitutes as
the ones most responsible for its spread. That line of thinking found its way into the treaty ports,
and in the last decade of the Tokugawa period first the Russians and then the British demanded
58
that Japanese prostitutes servicing their nationals be regularly examined and treated if infected.
Review of the Literature
Mirroring the popularity of the floating world during the Tokugawa era, the topic of the licensed
quarters and especially their representation in pop culture have been a focus of English-language
scholarship on early modern Japanese sex work. Elizabeth De Sabato Swinton, Anne Louise Avery,
and Laura W. Allen, among others, have examined ukiyo-e or woodblock prints depicting the
59
quarters, their residents, and clients. Shunga or erotic prints have served as more specific
source material for numerous additional works. While Timon Screech has presented shunga as
pornographic products of a hedonistic world and has argued that erotic prints were produced to
provide men with visuals to stimulate self-pleasuring, Sumie Jones, Timothy Clark, C. Andrew
Gerstle, Aki Ishigami, Akiko Yano, Rosina Buckland, Chris Uhlenbeck, Inge Klompmakers, and
Paul Berry have collectively challenged that label of pornography. They have done so by stressing
that shunga were part of a vibrant publishing culture and have explored circulation, censorship,
changes in message over time, form, humor, and the symbolism of items depicted, among a
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variety of avenues of analysis. How consumers viewed and used shunga are topics that would
benefit from additional research. Shunga and ukiyo-e more broadly also have the potential to
reveal more about the gender roles that female and male prostitutes and their clients played.
Those roles and the depictions of licensed sex workers emerged from the brushes of male artists,
and also enlightening would be more investigation into the ways in which ukiyo-e glamorized the
licensed quarters and contributed to the idolization of high-ranking courtesans.
Sex work within the quarters has also attracted more attention than that by semiofficial and
clandestine female prostitutes. Moreover, as only one of thirty-five licensed districts, Yoshiwara
has received disproportionate coverage, including by Stephen and Ethel Longstreet and J. E. de
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Becker, a novelist, a collector of Japanese prints, and a lawyer, respectively. Scholarly
publications, ranging from chapters by Teruoka Yasutaka and Sone Hiromi to a monograph by
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Cecilia Segawa Seigle, have shed light on Yoshiwara’s establishment and development. As befits
a monograph, Seigle has delved further, exploring the hierarchy that existed among prostitutes
and brothels, the processes for securing their services, their clothing and training, the fees that
they charged, the treatment that they received, and Yoshiwara’s importance to Edo social and
cultural history. The emphasis on this one district and high-ranking prostitutes, however, has
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reinforced the portrayal of licensed sex work in many ukiyo-e as glamorous, and that depiction
merits deconstructing and the topic of consent as opposed to coercion and the possibilities that
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sex work provided further inquiry.
Unlike Yoshiwara, Osaka’s Shinmachi and Kyoto’s Shimabara districts have not been the subject
of in-depth study, although they have been briefly mentioned in English-language scholarship,
and even less attention has been paid to the other licensed districts in operation, with just a few
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exceptions like Nagasaki’s Maruyama. Incorporating it into her exploration of travel, Laura
Nenzi has discussed the attractions of the site and its resident prostitutes and shown how
65
visitors’ engagement informed how they constructed self-identities. Amy Stanley in turn has
challenged ideas of licensed prostitutes as without agency by elaborating on how Maruyama sex
workers and their parents utilized shogunal ideas about “proper” womanly behavior to advance
66
their own interests against those of brothel owners.
Together with Nam-lin Hur, Nenzi and Stanley have further decentered the focus on sex work as
linked to licensed brothel districts and Yoshiwara in particular with their research on semiofficial
and clandestine prostitutes. Their repositioning of the lens of inquiry represents one of the most
important developments in recent scholarship and builds on the translation into English and
publication of Sone’s look at shogunal efforts at regulation and the conditions under which sex
67
workers operated outside the licensed quarters. Discussing sex work in post stations, in
provincial cities, in market towns, at hot-spring resorts, and on temple and shrine grounds, Hur,
Nenzi, and Stanley have highlighted that the line between licensed and semiofficial and
clandestine prostitution was not as rigid as the walls of the quarters suggest and that market
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forces overwhelmingly determined the development and characteristics of the sex trade. For
example, focusing on Sensōji, Hur has illustrated how this Buddhist temple in Edo came to
welcome prostitution on temple grounds as a way to shore up its finances and in the process
created a space for play through which the underclass could resist the social and economic
inequalities embedded in nearby Yoshiwara. Expanding her look to include all of Japan, Stanley
has elaborated on how the desire for profit drove not just private entrepreneurs but also
government officials to encourage and participate in the trafficking of women even when such
actions contradicted Neo-Confucian notions of benevolent rule. She has also shown how
prostitution became entrenched in villages as commercialization and urban culture spread and
discussed how sex work impacted families, gender roles, and popular views of prostitutes
themselves. As Stanley has noted, nearly 500 words existed in Japanese during the Tokugawa
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period to refer to prostitutes. That number alone speaks to the pervasiveness of sex work, and
study of their etymologies and usage may well provide further evidence not only about popular
and official perceptions of female sex workers but also about the influence of class in the sex
industry.
As with prostitution outside the licensed quarters, sex between men has attracted more scholarly
attention since the late 20th century, reflective of a larger trend of increased interest in the
history of sexuality. Short commentaries can be found in works ranging from textbooks such as
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by Mikiso Hane and Louis G. Perez to monographs by Eiko Ikegami. These have focused on
nanshoku among samurai and noted the practice of shudō. Most of these brief discussions,
however, have not zeroed in on male–male sex as commercial transactions. Nonetheless, studies
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of kabuki by scholars, including Donald Shively and Stephen Murray and Timon Screech’s
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exploration of erotic images, have touched on prostitution by actors. Paul Schalow has provided
a fuller look at sex work in the world of kabuki through the lens of Ihara Saikaku’s 1687 The Great
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Mirror of Male Love. Saikaku’s classic includes forty stories split evenly between those that
address nanshoku between samurai and those that focus on actors and their non-samurai paying
patrons, and Schalow’s translation of all forty and a lengthy introduction have made accessible
73
and contextualized a key primary source. While also incorporating Saikaku’s stories, Gary
Leupp and Gregory Pflugfelder, in separate monographs, have pointed out the variety of primary
74
sources that can be mined to learn more about nanshoku. Making use of art and fictional
writings, Leupp has examined the development of male–male sex in Tokugawa urban areas,
discussed sexual practices and the impact of age and status on the same, and considered how
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government policies and the commercialization of the economy affected nanshoku culture.
Eschewing a focus on actual behavior, Pflugfelder has instead delved into how male–male sex
was depicted and what meanings were attached to it in popular, legal, and medical writings.
Emerging out of this scholarship by Leupp and Pflugfelder, portions of which have focused on
male prostitution, have been debates about the suitability of using terms such as
“homosexuality” and “bisexuality,” about factors that gave rise to nanshoku, about causes of its
decline during the later Tokugawa period, and about the specific sexual acts in which men
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engaged. Whether further inquiry will lessen the analytical and interpretative divide remains to
be seen. What is clear is that much more remains to be learned about male sex work, its
characteristics and economic impact outside of urban areas, the appeal of male prostitutes for
commoners, migration by boys and men for prostitution, consent and agency among male sex
workers, and female clients.
The literature on sex work with foreigners has similarly grown over the last several decades,
although most examinations of the subject are relatively brief and several publications
incorporate commentaries within studies with other foci. For example, Gary Leupp has discussed
prostitution as part of a larger exploration of sexual relationships between Japanese women and
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Western and other Asian men from the mid-16th century to the end of the 19th century. Susan
Burns has used Russian demands that Maruyama sex workers be tested for syphilis as a vehicle
for analyzing discourses about disease, sexuality, and the body in relation to the developing
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Japanese nation-state. As mentioned previously, Laura Nenzi has written about Nagasaki’s
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Maruyama district in conjunction with travel. Also commenting on Maruyama’s function as a
licensed quarter for foreigners, Amy Stanley has pointed out how its prostitutes differed from
those elsewhere in leaving their brothels for sex work, often residing with a foreigner for years
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and not infrequently serving as a wife to and bearing children for that foreigner. One more
writing on Maruyama has come from Frits Vos, who made extensive use of the letters of
Dutchmen stationed in Nagasaki and whose 1971 article, originally published in Dutch, has since
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been translated into English. Shifting the lens to the Miyazaki licensed quarter in Yokohama,
Simon Partner has woven that district into a study of how global trade impacted ordinary
Japanese in this treaty port and shaped Japan’s transformation from the late 1850s to the early
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1870s. Neil Pedlar and Ann-Marie Davis have likewise offered insights into the Miyazaki
district, with Pedlar providing a brief description of Gankirō, the most famous brothel there, and
Davis analyzing woodblock prints and board games (sugoroku) for what they relate about
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Japanese perceptions of foreigners. As this overview highlights, scholarship has focused on two
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sites of sex work with foreigners. Prostitution with foreign clients also occurred in Hakodate from
the mid-1850s and in Kobe during the last months of the Tokugawa period, and research on
prostitution in these locales and investigation of male sex work with foreigners stand out as two
avenues of inquiry needing attention to paint a fuller picture.
Primary Sources
The licensed quarters served as the subject and setting for scores of Edo-period publications and
artistic works, all products of a thriving culture spurred on primarily by urban commoners or
chōnin. Among the most accessible of these primary sources are ukiyo-e, thanks to published
reproductions, catalogs, and websites for special exhibitions, and permanent displays at
museums, including Tokyo’s Ōta Memorial Museum of Art and Matsumoto’s Japan Ukiyoe
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Museum, both devoted solely to woodblock prints. Hishikawa Moronobu, Okamura Masanobu,
Utagawa Hiroshige, and Kitagawa Utamaro, to mention just a few artists, produced individual
prints and whole collections introducing famous licensed prostitutes, sharing images of and
comparing daily life in the major licensed quarters, and showing future visitors their way around
the demimonde (see Figure 6). Such visual guides included graphic representations of the act of
sex itself or shunga. These erotic prints proliferated, and by one estimate nearly one-fifth of all
85
Tokugawa ukiyo-e fell into this subgenre. Relaxed restrictions in Japan since the late 1990s have
allowed for the reproduction of many shunga, and museum exhibits in Japan and elsewhere along
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with exhibit catalogs and websites focusing on shunga have made research easier.
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Figure 6. Hiroshige included this view of the main thoroughfare in Yoshiwara in 1842. Nakanochō in the Yoshiwara
District, from the series Famous Views of Edo, by Utagawa Hiroshige. From Wikimedia Commons <https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hiroshige,_Nakanoch%C3%B4_in_the_Yoshiwara_District,_Edo_meisho.jpg>.
Tokugawa writers for their part used a variety of different kinds of prose and verse to explore the
licensed quarters and to depict the lives, foibles, and heartbreak of prostitutes and their clients.
Travel guides and critiques of courtesans and brothel districts were among the earliest
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publications, and their portrayals of sexual hedonism gained them a sizable readership. In the
late 17th century, ukiyo-zōshi or works on the floating world emerged as a new genre and
flourished until the mid-18th century, as did plays, both for kabuki and the puppet theater. Ukiyo-
zōshi included vernacular fictional works of a variety of lengths, ranging from novels to short
stories, and offered a realistic yet at times cynical perspective. The most noted of all ukiyo-zōshi
contributors was Ihara Saikaku, whose The Life of an Amorous Man (Kōshoku ichidai otoko) is
credited as having initiated the genre and whose The Great Mirror of Male Love, as noted, serves as
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one of the most useful fictional sources on nanshoku. By the late 1700s, the heyday of ukiyo-
zōshi had passed, and gaining in popularity were works that used puns, wordplay, and comedy to
satirize the licensed quarters and their patrons, such as sharebon (books of wit and fashion),
senryū (humorous poems), and kibyōshi (satiric picture books). Examples of all of these kinds of
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literature are extant, and many have been reprinted in single volumes, anthologies, chapters, and
articles, with a much smaller although still fairly representative selection translated into
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English.
The writings of foreigners who visited or lived in Japan from the early 1600s provide another
window through which to research sex work during the Tokugawa period. These include travel
journals, diaries, reports, diplomatic memos, other correspondence, and histories, with the
majority relating to the decade following the opening of the treaty ports in 1859. Penned by
Catholic and Protestant missionaries, merchants, doctors, teachers, and government officials,
these sources reflect the contemporary sensibilities of their authors and the geopolitical status of
their own countries vis-à-vis Japan. They nonetheless share commentary about regulatory
measures, the physical features of particular licensed quarters and brothels, practices for
soliciting clients, fees, sexually transmitted diseases, and prostitutes themselves. While many of
these sources remain available only in the language in which they were originally written, a
handful have been translated into English and published in full or liberally quoted from, as have
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materials first written in English. Thanks to digitization and the creation of online archives,
some of these works are readily accessible.
An array of other kinds of primary sources on licensed prostitution exists in Japanese, and many
of them require that a scholar be conversant with the classical language of Tokugawa-era official
writings. That corpus includes shogunal decrees pertaining to the quarters and the sale of people,
contracts indenturing women as prostitutes, population and tax registers for the brothel districts,
and legal action taken by and against brothel owners, such as petitions from prostitutes seeking
protection from abuse. Variety characterizes the kinds of sources available in print and in
archives on semiofficial and unlicensed prostitution by girls and women and by male sex workers
as well. While little is accessible to non-Japanese-speaking researchers on sex outside of the
licensed quarters and by boys and men other than ukiyo-e and a few works of fiction, scholars
working in Japanese can make use of short stories, graphic guides to sexual gratification,
business accounts and ordinances related to post stations, reform decrees that resulted in arrests,
ordinances specifically related to kabuki actors, the diaries of officials rendering verdicts on those
arrested, and police records of those caught, the latter of which often detailed both punishments
and the circumstances that forced women and girls into sex work. Mining these sources on
prostitution outside the licensed quarters can be challenging, just as is finding the voices of sex
workers, as virtually all of the primary material was penned by men of status. For those interested
in pursuing research on prostitution during the Tokugawa period, however, the sources still have
much to tell.
Links to Digital Materials

Ukiyo-e.org <https://ukiyo-e.org/>: a search engine and database of over 220,000 woodblock prints from museums,
universities, libraries, and dealers, created by John Resig.
Library of Congress: Japanese Fine Prints Pre-1915 <https://www.loc.gov/collections/japanese-fine-prints-pre-1915/

about-this-collection/>: a database of more than 2,000 woodblock prints in the collection of the Library of Congress.
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Art Research Center database <https://www.dh-jac.net/db/nishikie/search_portal.php>: a database of over 3,000

woodblock prints maintained by the Art Research Center at Ritsumeikan University, with a partial English-language
search engine.
Viewing Japanese Prints <https://viewingjapaneseprints.net/texts/ukiyoe/intro_ukiyoe.html>: a website with links to

prints and essays, with additional references curated and written by John Fiorillo.
Art Resource <https://www.artres.com/>: an archive of stock photos with more than 2,300 woodblock prints included
under the search words “ukiyoe” and “Yoshiwara.”
Edo Haku Archives <https://www.edohakuarchives.jp/>: a digital archives for the holdings of the Edo-Tokyo Museum.
including woodblock prints, with an English-language search engine.
Further Reading
Allen, Laura W., ed. Seduction: Japan’s Floating World: The John C. Weber Collection. San Francisco: Asian Art Museum,
2015.
Davis, Ann Marie L. Imagining Prostitution in Modern Japan, 1850-1913. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019.
de Becker, J. E. The Nightless City or the History of the Yoshiwara Yūkwaku, with a foreword by Donald Ritchie (1899,
reprint). New York: ICG Muse, 2000.
Downer, Lesley. Women of the Pleasure Quarters: The Secret History of the Geisha. New York: Broadway, 2001.
Hibbett, Howard. The Floating World in Japanese Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.
Hockley, Allen. The Prints of Isoda Koryūsai: Floating World Culture and Its Consumers in Eighteenth-Century Japan.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.
Hur, Nam-lin. Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensōji and Edo Society, Harvard East Asian
Monographs 185. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000.
Jones, Sumie, ed. Imaging/Reading Eros: Proceedings for the Conference, Sexuality and Edo Culture, 1750-1850.
Bloomington: East Asian Studies Center, Indiana University, 1996.
Keene, Donald, trans. Four Major Plays of Chikamatsu. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.
Kornicki, Peter F. “Nishiki no Ura: An Instance of Censorship and the Structure of a Sharebon.” Monumenta Nipponica
32, no. 2 (1977): 153–188. Note: Pages 167–188 include a translation of Santō Kyōden’s “A Brothel in the Light of Day:
The Other Side of the Brocade,” a comic set in the floating world.
Lane, Richard. Images from the Floating World: The Japanese Print. New York: Konecky and Konecky, 1978.
Leupp, Gary P. Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543–1900. London: Continum, 2003.
Leupp, Gary P. Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995.
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Lindsey, William R. Fertility and Pleasure: Ritual and Sexual Values in Tokugawa Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi
Press, 2007.
Morikuri Shigekazu. “Karayuki-san and Shingintori: Prostitution and the Industrial Economy in Amakusa at the End of
the Edo Period.” In Gender and Japanese History. Edited by Wakita Haruko, Anne Bouchy, and Ueno Chizuko.
Translated by Llewelyn Hughes, vol. 1, 327–343. Osaka, Japan: Osaka University Press, 1999.
Pflugfelder, Greg. Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japan, 1600–1950. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999.
Rogers, Lawrence. “She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not: Shinjū and Shikidō Ōkagami.” Monumenta Nipponica 49, no. 1
(Spring 1994): 31–60.
Screech, Timon. Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700–1820. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press,
1999.
Seigle, Cecilia Segawa. Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi
Press, 1993.
Shirane, Haruo, ed. Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900, Abridged. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2008.
Sone, Hiromi. “Prostitution and Public Authority in Early Modern Japan.” In Women and Class in Japanese History.
Edited by Hitomi Tonomura, Anne Walthall, and Wakita Haruko. Translated by Akiko Terashima and Anne Walthall,
169–185. Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, 25 (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of
Michigan, 1999.
Stanley, Amy. Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan, with a foreword by
Matthew H. Sommer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
Swinton, Elizabeth De Sabato, ed. The Women of the Pleasure Quarter: Japanese Paintings and Prints of the Floating
World, with a foreword by James A. Welu. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1995.
Teruoka, Yasutaka. “The Pleasure Quarters and Tokugawa Culture.” In 18th Century Japan: Culture and Society. Edited
by C. Andrew Gerstle, 3–32. Sydney, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1989.
Notes
1. In line with East Asian practice, Japanese surnames here precede personal names, except for those scholars cited
whose work has listed their names otherwise.
2. Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2020), 13.
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3. For a sample of recent scholarship that has shown just how fluid and multifaceted the social order was, see David L.
Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Daniel
Botsman, Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and
Maren Ehlers, “Benevolence, Charity, and Duty: Famine Relief and Domain Society During the Tenmei Famine,”
Monumenta Nipponica 69, no. 1 (2014): 55–101.
4. Elizabeth Dorn Lublin, Reforming Japan: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in the Meiji Period (Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 102; Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 90; and Cecilia Segawa Seigle, Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the
Japanese Courtesan (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1993), 7–8.
5. Sone Hiromi refers to this licensed system as “public” in contrast to “private” prostitution (shishō) or sex work by
women and girls outside the walls of the designated brothel quarters and without any government sanction.
Semiofficial prostitutes also operated in a gray area between the two. See the section “Sex Work Outside the Licensed
Quarters and Outside of Tokugawa Law” for a discussion of private and semiauthorized prostitution; and Sone Hiromi,
“Prostitution and Public Authority in Early Modern Japan,” in Women and Class in Japanese History, ed. Hitomi
Tonomura, Anne Walthall, and Wakita Haruko, trans. Akiko Terashima and Anne Walthall, Michigan Monograph Series
in Japanese Studies, 25 (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1999), 169–185.
6. Joseph Ernest de Becker, The Nightless City or the History of the Yoshiwara Yūkwaku, with a foreword by Donald
Ritchie (1899; reprint, New York: ICG Muse, 2000), 1–5, quoted from 3 and 4; and Seigle, Yoshiwara, 20–24.
7. The shogunate stripped ninety daimyō of their lands in yet another political settlement. This move left nearly a
quarter of a million samurai masterless, and they “presented the greatest threat to the bakufu during the early
decades of Tokugawa rule”; Seigle, Yoshiwara, 22; the gender disparity in early modern Japanese cities added to the
potential volatility of urban settings. A case in point is, in the 1730s and 1740s, Edo’s commoner population included
roughly 170 men for every one hundred women; and Gary P. Leupp, Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in
Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 77.
8. William R. Lindsey, Fertility and Pleasure: Ritual and Sexual Values in Tokugawa Japan (Honolulu: University of
Hawaiʻi Press, 2007), 6.
9. Seigle, Yoshiwara, 23–24; and Sone, “Prostitution and Public Authority in Early Modern Japan,” 170.
10. Sheldon Garon has cited a 1733 shogunal code as evidence of this line of thinking. That code stipulated that,
should non-samurai parents offer up their daughter for adoption in order to alleviate financial hardship, they had no
legal standing to file a grievance in the event that the adoptive family subsequently forced the girl to engage in
prostitution; and Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, 91.
11. Sone, “Prostitution and Public Authority in Early Modern Japan,” 170; and Seigle, Yoshiwara, 20–24.
12. Amy Stanley, Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan, with a foreword by
Matthew H. Sommer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 46.
13. These figures come from Teruoka Yasutaka, “The Pleasure Quarters and Tokugawa Culture,” in 18th Century Japan:
Culture and Society, ed. C. Andrew Gerstle (Sydney, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 7–8; Seigle, Yoshiwara, 271; and
Stanley, Selling Women, 2.
14. Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, 90; and Sone, “Prostitution and Public Authority in Early Modern Japan,” 170, 181.
15. Seigle, Yoshiwara, 58–59, 88, 233–234; and de Becker, The Nightless City or the History of the Yoshiwara Yūkwaku,
28–30, 37–38.
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date: 13 April 2023
16. The koto and shamisen are both stringed instruments, the former having thirteen strings and the latter three, while
the shakuhachi is a flute, traditionally made from bamboo.
17. Seigle, Yoshiwara, 34; Teruoka, “The Pleasure Quarters and Tokugawa Culture,” 6–10, quoted from 9.
18. Richard Lane, Images from the Floating World: The Japanese Print (New York: Konecky & Konecky, 1978), 11; and
quoted in Gerald Figal, “Chapter Seven: The World of Sex in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan.”
19. In 1991, Donald Shively wrote that the licensed “quarter was a small island free of class restrictions, where a
hierarchy of services corresponded to what the customer was willing to pay. . . .The affluent commoner could find
refuge from the humiliation of his position in the samurai world by commanding luxurious surroundings and the
greatest esteem that flattery and enthusiastic attentions could convey”; Donald H. Shively, “Popular Culture,” in The
Cambridge History of Japan, ed. John Whitney Hall, vol. 4, Early Modern Japan (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 747; cited in Gary P. Leupp, “Capitalism and Homosexuality in Eighteenth Century Japan,” Historical Reflections/
Réflexions Historiques 33, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 142; while wealth did shape a townsman’s visit, extant evidence does not
support the suggestion that he sought to escape or defy his status vis-à-vis samurai with a trip to a licensed district.
20. Seigle, Yoshiwara, 184.
21. A client meeting a tayū at an ageya typically had to give a gratuity to the ageya owner and mistress, pay for
refreshments and entertainment while waiting for the tayū to arrive, and tip the members of the tayū’s entourage.
Seigle, Yoshiwara, 65–68.
22. de Becker, The Nightless City or the History of the Yoshiwara Yūkwaku, 60–64; and Seigle, Yoshiwara, 34–35, 72, 87–
88, 92, 125–128, 203.
23. Cecilia Seigle has pointed out that on occasion brothel owners arranged for a deflowering knowing full well that
the girl had already had sex. Many a patron went along, for “to know and acquiesce was regarded as the essence of
sophistication.” Seigle, Yoshiwara, 179.
24. Seigle, Yoshiwara, 81, 84–85, 178–182, 212–214.
25. Wakita Haruko, “The Medieval Household and Gender Roles within the Imperial Family, Nobility, Merchants, and
Commoners,” in Women and Class in Japanese History, ed. Hitomi Tonomura, Anne Walthall, and Wakita Haruko,
trans. Gary P. Leupp (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1999), 94; and Lindsey, Fertility
and Pleasure, 4–5, 33–39.
26. Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995), 218–219; Laura Nenzi has also written about travel in connection with prostitution in Excursions in
Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press,
2008); in particular, see chap. 7, “Bodies, Brothels, and Baths: Travel and Physical Re-creation,” 165–185.
27. Sone, “Prostitution and Public Authority in Early Modern Japan,” 173–174.
30. Shiho Imai, “The Independent Working Woman as Deviant in Tokugawa Japan, 1600–1867 <http://hdl.handle.net/
2027/spo.ark5583.0016.005>,” Michigan Feminist Studies 16 (2002).
31. Imai, “The Independent Working Woman as Deviant in Tokugawa Japan, 1600–1867 <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/
spo.ark5583.0016.005>.”
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33. Yotaka, the Japanese term for streetwalker or “night walker,” apparently came from an Edo business of the same
moniker where illicit prostitutes ravaged by syphilis could be made presentable. According to J. E. de Becker, “women
who were full of disease were painted and made up to look like young girls, and old hags had their eyebrows
blackened with charcoal and their hair fashionably dressed in order to add to their attractions. Many of these
prostitutes had their noses eaten away by syphilis, so they had the damage repaired by coloured wax drippings”; de
Becker, The Nightless City or the History of the Yoshiwara Yūkwaku, 398; for more on syphilis and other sexually
transmitted diseases, see Susan Burns, “Bodies and Borders: Syphilis, Prostitution, and the Nation in Japan, 1860–
1890,” U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal, English Supplement 15 (1998): 3–30; and William D. Johnston, “Sexually
Transmitted Diseases and Demographic Change in Early Modern Japan,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine
30 (2009): 74–92.
34. Stanley, Selling Women, 7.
35. Sone, “Prostitution and Public Authority in Early Modern Japan,” 182–183; Amy Stanley has discussed the fact that
Yoshiwara brothel owners appealed to Edo officials for help in eliminating prostitution outside the quarter and were
themselves authorized to arrest and transport prostitutes to the district. Their motivations were self-serving in that
they were then provided with sex labor. Yet, as Stanley has highlighted, they also were interested in “protecting or
even perpetuating prostitution outside the quarters” in part because they benefited from the same contacts as pimps
when procuring women; Stanley, Selling Women, 60–64, quoted from 63.
36. Conrad Totman, Early Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 341–346; and Mikiso Hane and
Louis G. Perez, Premodern Japan: A Historical Survey, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2015), 254–255.
37. For discussion of censorship of comic books depicting licensed prostitutes, see Peter F. Kornicki, “Nishiki no Ura:
An Instance of Censorship and the Structure of a Sharebon,” Monumenta Nipponica 32, no. 2 (1977): 153–188 (pages
167–188 include a translation of one such book).
38. Isao Soranaka, “The Kansei Reforms—Success or Failure?” Monumenta Nipponica 33, no. 2 (summer 1978): 153.
39. Seigle, Yoshiwara, 129–130, 164–168, quoted from 167.
40. Soranaka, “The Kansei Reforms,” 154; and Sone, “Prostitution and Public Authority in Early Modern Japan,” 175.
41. For a thoughtful discussion of terminology regarding male–male sex and reasons to avoid applying more Western
and contemporary words such as “homosexual” and “homosexuality” to refer to Tokugawa-period same-sex relations,
see Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), 4–6.
42. Leupp, Male Colors, 58–61; for a discussion of Shinto, Buddhist, and Confucian thinking regarding male–male sex,
see Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire, 99–104.
43. As Pflugfelder has discussed, the shogunate, domains, and municipal areas did issue laws and injunctions related
to male–male sex, but these addressed crimes such as murder and behaviors that disturbed the public order and
violated the values of decorum and moderation. In other words, they did not target the practice of nanshoku itself.
Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire, 97–145.
44. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire, 155–156; Leupp, Male Colors, 78; and Seigle, Yoshiwara, 209–210.
45. Stanley, Selling Women, 15–16.
46. While the lowest of female and male prostitutes charged similar fees, elite male sex workers were able to
command more money from clients than even tayū. Leupp, Male Colors, 72.
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date: 13 April 2023
47. Leupp, Male Colors, 62–71; Gary P. Leupp, Servants, Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 98, 116–117; and Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire, 119–121.
48. Leupp has suggested based on research by J. Mark Ramseyer that changes in labor opportunities may have given
adolescent males tied to multiyear contracts more leverage to refuse to engage in sex work. He has posited that the
narrowing gap in the ratio of women to men in Edo and increasing rates of marriage contributed to a decline in male
prostitution as well. Pflugfelder is among several scholars who have questioned that demographic explanation and
has offered as other possible factors changing “cultural tastes” and a decline in the practice of shudō linked in part to
a decreased presence by young actors on the kabuki stage. Leupp, “Capitalism and Homosexuality in Eighteenth-
Century Japan,” 149–150; and Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire, 91–95, 155–157, quoted from 92.
49. Gary P. Leupp, Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543–1900 (London: Continuum
Books, 2003), 48–51; Leupp has pointed out that foreigners likely also had access to male prostitutes given acceptance
of same-sex relations in Japan but that primary sources in English provide little concrete evidence.
50. Leupp, Interracial Intimacy in Japan, 99, 106–111; Frits Vos, “Forgotten Foibles: Love and the Dutch at Dejima
(1641–1854),” East Asian History no. 39 (December 2014): 140–141; Vos’s piece originally appeared in Lydia Brüll and
Ulrich Kemper, eds., Asien Tradition und Fortschritt: Festschrift für Horst Hammitzsch zu seinem 60 (Wiesbaden,
Germany: Otto Harrassowitz, 1971), 614–633.
51. The number of prostitute visits to each group of foreigners in 1732 highlights the difference in demand. While
24,644 were recorded to the Chinese area, 270 were listed for Dejima. Leupp, Interracial Intimacy in Japan, 111.
52. Leupp, Interracial Intimacy in Japan, 106, 110–111; Vos, “Forgotten Foibles,” 141, 145–146; and Nenzi, Excursions in
Identity, 170.
53. Nenzi, Excursions in Identity, 169–173; for a brief discussion of senryū or humorous poems and woodblock prints
about sex between foreigners and prostitutes, see Leupp, Interracial Intimacy in Japan, 113–114.
54. Leupp, Interracial Intimacy in Japan, 144–149; and Simon Partner, The Merchant’s Tale: Yokohama and the
Transformation of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 15.
55. Leupp, Interracial Intimacy in Japan, 149–151; and Partner, The Merchant’s Tale, 15–16, 26.
56. Partner, The Merchant’s Tale, 60.
57. Partner, The Merchant’s Tale, 60.
58. Susan Burns has noted that in the late Tokugawa period, Japanese considered syphilis “ʻjust’ a disease,” and thus
it did not invoke the same handwringing as in the West; and Burns, “Bodies and Borders,” 8–9, 16, quoted from 9.
59. Elizabeth De Sabato Swinton, ed., The Women of the Pleasure Quarter: Japanese Paintings and Prints of the Floating
World, with a foreword by James A. Welu (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1995); Anne Louise Avery, Flowers of the
Floating World: Geisha and Courtesans in Japanese Prints and Photographs, 1772–1926 (Oxford: Sanders of Oxford and
Mayfield Press, 2006); and Laura W. Allen, ed., Seduction: Japan’s Floating World: The John C. Weber Collection (San
Francisco: Asian Art Museum, 2015).
60. Timon Screech, Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700–1820 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi
Press, 1999); Sumie Jones, ed., Imaging/Reading Eros: Proceedings for the Conference, Sexuality and Edo Culture, 1750–
1850 (Bloomington: East Asian Studies Center, Indiana University, 1996); Timothy Clark et al., eds., Shunga: Sex and
Pleasure in Japanese Art (London: The British Museum Press, 2013); C. Andrew Gerstle and Timothy Clark, eds.,
Shunga: Sex and Humor in Japanese Art and Literature, special issue of Japan Review 26 (2013); Rosina Buckland,
Shunga: Erotic Art in Japan (London: The British Museum Press, 2010); Chris Uhlenbeck et al., Japanese Erotic
Page 27 of 30
date: 13 April 2023
Fantasies: Sexual Imagery of the Edo Period (Amsterdam: Hotei, 2005); Inge Klompmakers, Harunobu Suzuki, and
Koryūsai Isoda, Japanese Erotic Prints Shunga by Harunobu and Koryūsai (Leiden, The Netherlands: Hotei, 2001); and
Paul Berry, “Rethinking Shunga: The Interpretation of Sexual Imagery of the Edo Period,” Archives of Asian Art 54
(2004): 7–22.
61. Stephen Longstreet and Ethel Longstreet, Yoshiwara: The Pleasure Quarters of Old Tokyo (Rutland, VT: Tuttle,
1988); Stephen Longstreet and Ethel Longstreet, Yoshiwara: City of the Senses (New York: David McKay, 1970); and de
Becker, The Nightless City or the History of the Yoshiwara Yūkwaku.
62. Teruoka, “The Pleasure Quarters and Tokugawa Culture”; Sone, “Prostitution and Public Authority in Early Modern
Japan”; and Seigle, Yoshiwara.
63. This view of sex work as glamorous does not apply to semiofficial and unlicensed prostitutes. For details on their
treatment, see Sone, “Prostitution and Public Authority in Early Modern Japan,” 177–181; and Stanley, Selling Women.
64. One additional exception is Yokohama’s Miyozaki district. A brief look at scholarship on this area is included here
with other literature on sex work with foreigners.
65. Nenzi, Excursions in Identity, 169–172.
67. Sone, “Prostitution and Public Authority in Early Modern Japan.”
68. Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Power in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensōji and Edo Society, Harvard East Asian
Monographs 185 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009); Nenzi, Excursions in Identity; and Stanley,
Selling Women.
69. Commentary on roughly a dozen names appears in Stanley, Selling Women, 14–15.
70. Hane and Perez, Premodern Japan, 164–166; Eiko Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and
the Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 209–210, 219, 290–291; and Michael
Wert has given a few lines to the subject in Samurai: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 76.
71. Donald Shively, “Bakufu versus Kabuki,” in Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan, ed. John W.
Hall and Marius B. Jansen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 231–262; Stephen O. Murray, “Male
Homosexuality in Japan before the Meiji Restoration,” in Oceanic Homosexualities, ed. Stephen O. Murray (New York:
Garland, 1992), 111–150; and Screech, Sex and the Floating World.
72. Ihara Saikaku, The Great Mirror of Male Love, trans. and introduction Paul Gordon Schalow (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1990).
73. While Schalow’s book stands out as the first such lengthy study specifically on nanshoku penned in English and
from an academic press, an English translation of La Voie des ésphèbes: Histoires des homosexualités au Japon was
published the year before. Tsuneo Watanabe and Jun’ichi Iwata, The Love of Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese
Homosexuality, trans. D. R. Roberts (London: GMP/Gay Men’s Press, 1989).
74. Leupp, Male Colors; and Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire.
75. Additional publications on nanshosku by Gary P. Leupp include “Male Homosexuality in Edo during the Late
Tokugawa Period, 1750–1850: Decline of a Tradition?,” in Jones, ed. Imaging/Reading Eros, 105–109; and Leupp,
“Capitalism and Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century Japan.”
Page 28 of 30
date: 13 April 2023
76. Book reviews of Leupp’s Male Colors by Gregory Pflugfelder, Margaret Childs, and Paul Schalow and of Pflugfelder’s
Cartographies of Desire by Leupp have served as one outlet for the exchange of differing arguments. Leupp has also
addressed them, discussed differences in textual analysis linked to academic discipline, and provided an overview of
scholarship on male–male sex in English and Japanese in “Male Homosexuality in Early Modern Japan: The State of
Scholarship,” in Queer Masculinities, 1550–1880: Siting Same-Sex Desire in the Early Modern World, with a preface by
George Rousseau, ed. Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 125–143.
77. Leupp, Interracial Intimacy in Japan, 48–52, 105–115, 149–152.
78. Burns, “Bodies and Borders.”
79. Nenzi, Excursions in Identity, 169–172.
81. Vos, “Forgotten Foibles.”
82. Partner, The Merchant’s Tale, 15–16, 26–27, 58–63, 116–117, 144–145.
83. Neil Pedlar, “The Gankiro Teahouse and No. 9 in Old Yokohama,” The Japan Society Proceedings 112 (Winter 1988–
1989): 29–42 [reprinted in J. E. Hoare, ed., Culture, Power and Politics in Treaty-Port Japan, 1854–1899: Key Papers,
Press and Contemporary Writings, vol. 1, Historical Perspectives (Kent, UK: Renaissance Books, 2018), 222–233]; and
Ann Marie L. Davis, Imagining Prostitution in Modern Japan, 1850–1913 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 41–79.
84. A sampling of published sources includes Timothy Clark, Ukiyo-e Paintings in the British Museum (London: British
Museum Press, 1992); David Waterhouse, The Harunobu Decade: A Catalogue of Woodcuts by Suzuki Harunobu and His
Followers in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Leiden, The Netherlands: Hotei, 2005); Gina Collia-Suzuki, The Complete
Woodblock Prints of Kitagawa Utamaro: A Descriptive Catalogue (London: Nezu Press, 2009); Janice Katz and Mami
Hatayama, eds., Painting the Floating World: Ukiyo-e Masterpieces from the Weston Collection (Chicago: Art Institute of
Chicago, 2018); Yokohama-e refers to ukiyo-e depicting life in the treaty port of Yokohama from 1859, and several
showing foreigners with Japanese prostitutes and at the Gankirō can be found in Ann Yonemura, Yokohama: Prints
from Nineteenth-Century Japan (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1990).
85. Leupp, “Capitalism and Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century Japan,” 142; for a sample of shunga, see Richard
Illing, Japanese Erotic Art and the Life of the Courtesan (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978).
86. Between 2012 and 2015, the Honolulu Museum of Art held three exhibits on shunga, with Arts of the Bedchamber
th
(2013) and Tongue in Cheek: Erotic Art in 19 -Century Japan (2014) focusing on the Tokugawa period. Five podcasts
produced as part of the exhibits can be heard through YouTube using “Honolulu Museum of Art Japanese Podcast
Shunga” as search words, and a lecture by Stephen Salel titled “Tongue in Cheek: Decoding the Elusive Humor of
th
19 -Century Japanese Shunga” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfxyvEeUXsc> is also available. For a
reproduction of many of the prints in the exhibits, see Shawn Eichman and Stephen Salel, Shunga: Stages of Desire,
with a foreword by Stephan Jost (New York: Skira Rizzoli Publications, 2014).
87. For a rare critique translated into English and dating from 1816, see “Pleasure Districts and Prostitutes,” in Mark
Teeuwen and Kate Wildman Nakai, eds., Lust, Commerce, and Corruption: An Account of What I Have Seen, by an Edo
Samurai, trans. Mark Teeuwen et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 309–367.
88. Ihara Saikaku, The Life of an Amorous Man, trans. Kenji Hamada (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1964); and Saikaku, The Great
Mirror of Male Love.
Page 29 of 30
date: 13 April 2023
89. See, e.g., Koikawa Harumachi, Mr. Glitter “N” Gold’s Dream of Splendor, in Early Modern Japanese Literature: An
Anthology, 1600–1900, Abridged, ed. Haruo Shirane (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 321–335; Kon
Hachirōemon, “Loverbirds’ First Journey,” in A Kamigata Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Metropolitan Centers,
1600–1750, ed. Sumie Jones, Adam L. Kern, and Kenji Watanabe (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2020), 356–360;
Umebori Kokuga, At a Fork on the Road to Hiring a Hooker, in An Edo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Mega-City,
1750–1850, ed. Sumie Jones and Kenji Watanabe (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2013), 65–76; and Chikamatsu
Monzaemon, “The Love Suicides of Sonezaki,” in Anthology of Japanese Literature from the Earlier Era to the Mid-
Nineteenth Century, ed. Donald Keene (New York: Grove Press, 1955), 391–409.
90. Published writings by foreigners include Richard Cocks, Diary of Richard Cocks, Cape-Merchant in the English
Factory in Japan, 1615–1622, With Correspondence, ed. Edward Maunde Thompson (London: Whiting, 1883); Engelbert
Kaempfer, Kaempfer’s Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed, ed., trans., annotated Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey (Honolulu:
University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1999); Charles Peter Thunberg, Travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia, Made Between the Years
1700 and 1779, 4 vols., 2nd ed. (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1795); Cornelis Theodoor Assendelft de Coningh, A Pioneer
in Yokohama: A Dutchman’s Adventures in the New Treaty Port, ed., trans. Martha Chaiklin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
2012); Ernest Satow, A Diplomat in Japan (London: Seeley, Service, 1922; Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 2002); Aimé Humbert,
Japan and the Japanese Illustrated, ed. Henry Walter Bates, trans. Frances Cashel Hoey (New York: D. Appleton, 1874;
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016). See also Michael Cooper, ed., They Came to Japan: An Anthology of
European Reports on Japan, 1543–1640 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965); and Hugh Cortazzi, Collected
Writings of Sir Hugh Cortazzi, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2000).
Related Articles
The Culture of Travel in Edo Period Japan
The Population History of Asia
Domestic Commerce during the Tokugawa period
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date: 13 April 2023

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Sex Work during the Tokugawa Era

Subjects: Gender, Japan, Sexuality

Inside the Licensed Quarters and Changes to Them over Time

Male Sex Workers

Sex Work and Foreigners

Review of the Literature

Links to Digital Materials

Library of Congress: Japanese Fine Prints Pre-1915 <https://www.loc.gov/collections/japanese-fine-prints-pre-1915/

Art Research Center database <https://www.dh-jac.net/db/nishikie/search_portal.php>: a database of over 3,000

Viewing Japanese Prints <https://viewingjapaneseprints.net/texts/ukiyoe/intro_ukiyoe.html>: a website with links to

20. Seigle, Yoshiwara, 184.

24. Seigle, Yoshiwara, 81, 84–85, 178–182, 212–214.

34. Stanley, Selling Women, 7.

39. Seigle, Yoshiwara, 129–130, 164–168, quoted from 167.

45. Stanley, Selling Women, 15–16.

56. Partner, The Merchant’s Tale, 60.

57. Partner, The Merchant’s Tale, 60.

65. Nenzi, Excursions in Identity, 169–172.

66. Stanley, Selling Women, 72–100.

67. Sone, “Prostitution and Public Authority in Early Modern Japan.”

74. Leupp, Male Colors; and Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire.

77. Leupp, Interracial Intimacy in Japan, 48–52, 105–115, 149–152.

78. Burns, “Bodies and Borders.”

79. Nenzi, Excursions in Identity, 169–172.

80. Stanley, Selling Women, 72–100.

81. Vos, “Forgotten Foibles.”

The Population History of Asia

Domestic Commerce during the Tokugawa period

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